Author: Razib Khan
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Relative & absolute perceptions of well being
I asked this on twitter, but no one responded. If you had to choose between two scenarios, which would you choose: – A world population of 10 billion where 90% were not malnourished? – A world population of 500 million were 90% were malnourished? The first scenario has 2.2 times as many malnourished individuals as…
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Open Thread – October 9th, 2010
Fall is upon us. I do not recommend The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. Too thin. Finally getting to Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. But after hearing him in interviews and reading his articles on the topic over the past six months as he…
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Friday Fluff – October 8th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Through the rugged roads of gene land 2. Weird search query of the week: “do estonians like finns”. Answer: no one likes Finns! (especially Swedes) 3. Comment of the week, in response to Things are looking up for the world’s poor!: These are all percentages, and the rates…
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Farmers, foragers, and us
At the Overcoming Bias weblog Robin Hanson has been ruminating on the shifts in human values and behaviors driven by transitions in modes of production. In particular, the dichotomy between foragers (hunter-gatherers) and farmers. Last week I pointed to Eric Michael Johnson’s review of data which indicate that modes of production may influence the normative…
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A generation of human genetics & genomics
If you are interested in human genomics and the types of papers I often review and discuss in this space, there’s a chapter of Vogel and Motulsky’s Human Genetics: Problems and Approaches you might find of interest. And, I just noticed that you can get it online (if you have academic access). It’s titled: Genetics and…
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Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery. It looks to be a combination of a virus and fungus. The paper itself is open access at PLoS ONE. The READ: Washed Up. A panning of the attempts of Jersey Shore “cast” members to cash in on their fame. I think the reason that JS was such…
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Epigenetics – what revolution?
A reader who goes by the handle “biologist,” and happens to be a molecular geneticist by training, states more clearly what is probably close to my own position (though he is far more well informed) in the comments below. I think it’s worth promoting: As far as I can tell, the existence of epigenetic mechanisms…
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Arise the vehicle! Arise the cell!
A quick follow up to my post Epigenetics arise! Adam Keiper, the editor of The New Atlantis, has graciously sent me a copy of the article, Getting Over the Code Delusion. I’ve also been told that the piece will be free to all on the website at any moment, so I invite readers to […]
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Epigenome effort makes its mark. “This week, the Roadmap Epigenomics Project, a US$170-million effort to identify and map those marks — known collectively as the human epigenome — begins its first comprehensive data release.” At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture. The story of executives taking home millions while the ship goes down is…
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Epigenetics arise!
Last week I quipped on twitter that epigenetics had started to become the scientific deus ex machina of our age, a phenomenon which offered the potential for boundless explanatory power. In the past I have felt that sexual selection and random genetic drift have fulfilled the same roles as one-size-fits-all-explanations at the service of all.…
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Ancient Rome as a death pit
One of the assumptions that I’ve made on this weblog repeatedly based on ancient literary references is the idea that before 1900 urban areas were population sinks. In Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America the historian Eric Rauchway asserts that ~1900 in the USA urban health and life expectancy surpassed that of rural…
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Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Urban and rural differences in mortality and causes of death in historical Poland. Unfortunately good demographic data on urban vs. rural death rates only date from the early modern era, but here in this Polish data set from the 19th and early 20th century you see the large urban > small urban > rural rank…
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The Human Nature Top 10
A few days Kevin Drum proposed a “Human Nature Top 10.” Here are the criteria: Not personal pet theories, but aspects of human nature that are (a) widely accepted and relatively noncontroversial among professionals, and (b) underappreciated by most of us. They can come from anywhere: economics, psychology, sociology, politics, anthropology, whatever. He offers two:…
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Things are looking up for the world’s poor!
I just listened to a discussion between John Horgan and Madhusree Mukerjee, and the conversation ended on a moderately down note as Mukerjee seemed pessimistic about the prospects for the world’s poor. Where do these people get the idea that things are getting worse? I recall the same sentiment from Massimo Pigliucci. These are people…
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Daily Data Dump – Monday
I don’t think I’ll post about Mormons this week. Alas, less traffic. Y chromosomes of Vlax Roma. Is it a coincidence that all these Roma genetics papers are coming out at the same time that the Roma are at the center of E.U. politics? Probably. Not So Hidden Influences. Christopher Hitchens asks “Is it so…
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The adaptive space of complexity
Evolution means many things to many people. On the one hand some scholars focus on time scales of “billions and billions,” and can ruminate upon the radical variation in body plans across the tree of life. Others put the spotlight on the change in gene frequencies on the scale of years, of Ph.D. programs. While…
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Open thread – October 2nd, 2010
Won’t be too long until Halloween and a Republican Congress! I thought that today I would outline some implicit rules-of-thumb for comments on this weblog. I don’t have an official comments policy, and won’t write one out explicitly, because I don’t want to give people a false sense of security. – I’d appreciate it if…
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Polygamy and human evolution: maybe it’s agriculture
Eric Michael Johnson has a fascinating piece in Psychology Today, Sex, Evolution, and the Case of the Missing Polygamists. I want to spotlight a few paragraphs: Keep in mind that in terms of interpreting such genetic evidence we are of necessity confined to a fairly recent time depth (and remember, by “recent” someone like me…
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Friday Fluff – October 1st, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Levels of selection & the full Price Equation 2. Weird search query of the week: “politcal correct cultures in science-fiction.” I direct you to Ursula K. Le Guin. 3. Comment of the week, in response to